SCOURGE of tax-avoiding fat cats and weasley schemes designed to fleece the public purse, Dame Margaret Hodge was herself grilled by a rapt Hexham audience on Saturday.

Effortlessly commanding the full attention of the packed Queen’s Hall auditorium, the author of the recently published Held to Account, about her years at the helm of the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, said circumstances had conspired to put her on that particular path.

“In 2010, I had just fought BNP in Barking and successfully seen off Nick Griffin, but Labour lost the general election,” she said.

“I was tired of just doing policy review and my husband had just died, so I knew I had to really keep busy.”

She duly applied for, and was appointed to, the post of chairman of the oldest committee in the Houses of Parliament. Founded in 1861 by Gladstone, it is tasked with following the public pound, wherever it goes.

“In the 1860s and 70s the committee looked after £80m in the public purse, which would be six to seven billion now. Today we look after £700bn.”

Under Gladstone, the committee met for just four months a year to work on one annual report. During Hodge’s five-year reign, it met twice a week and produced 246 reports.

People invited to appear before the Public Accounts Committee were not legally bound to do so, she told Richard Moss, the BBC’s political editor for the North-East & Cumbria interviewing her, but a sturdy letter would be sent to people who appeared reluctant to attend.

Those who have sweated under her withering glare include the movers and shakers of Vodaphone, Amazon, Google, Starbucks and Goldman Sachs, and those responsible for wasteful spending in the Ministry of Defence, the NHS and the BBC.

“A whistle blower sent me a chunk of papers about the sweetheart deal Goldman Sachs had with HMRC,” she said.

“I have a lot of admiration for whistle blowers – it takes courage – and that was a pretty unconscionable agreement.”

The Government’s own head of taxes had refused to speak on the matter, but just six weeks after the Public Accounts Committee investigation, he’d left his job.

After they’d ‘done’ Goldman Sachs, a journalist from Reuters had drawn her attention to the wheeze Starbucks was on to. By that point the company had been trading in Britain for 15 years and was declaring profits to investors, but losses to the tax office.

Starbucks had a huge number of outlets here, but did three things to minimise its tax bill: it registered its brand copyright in a lower tax jurisdiction (on this occasion Holland) and then levied on every British outlet a corporate charge payable to its Dutch HQ; it claimed it bought all its coffee beans in Switzerland, another tax haven and the company overall was registered in Bermuda.

She said: “Any Starbucks outlet that wanted to ‘borrow’ money for investment would have to do so from the outfit in Bermuda at a huge interest rate, higher than if they had got a loan from a bank here. It was all designed, quite simply, to channel huge chunks of the money away from here.”

Disgusted by the revelations, she decided to call the company to account, but thought it was unfair to bring in Starbucks alone – there were so many other international corporations doing the same. Google and Amazon duly received an ‘invitation’ too.

Hodge said: “They were all awful! Amazon got a regional development grant from the Government of £2.5m and the same year only paid £2.4m in taxes on a turnover of £126m.

“What shocked me most about Google, which pretended it wasn’t actually selling in Britain and then eventually did a deal with Osborne to pay £130m in tax, was the fact the head of Google here was paid more than that in wages that year alone.”